The Real Villain Isn't Who You Think: THE SCARLET LETTER (Book Review)

The Scarlet Letter

Quick fact first, because it's too good to skip: Nathaniel Hawthorne added the "w" to his last name as an adult, partly to put some distance between himself and his great-great-grandfather, a judge who sentenced people to death in the Salem witch trials. So when a Hawthorne writes a book about a town that loves punishing people in public, he is not guessing. He grew up next to the family business.

Published in 1850, "The Scarlet Letter" is set two hundred years earlier, in Puritan Boston, and it opens with about the worst possible way to start a Tuesday: a woman named Hester Prynne is marched out of prison with her baby and made to stand on a scaffold in front of the entire town. Stitched to her dress is a red letter A. Everyone already knows what it stands for. Nobody has to explain it to her. That's the whole punishment, really — just knowing that everyone knows.

They want one more thing from her, though: the father's name. Give that up, and maybe the shame gets split two ways instead of one.

Hester doesn't say a word.

Here's the part that would be a twist if it weren't announced fairly early — the father is Arthur Dimmesdale, the town's own minister, the guy everyone goes to when they need spiritual advice or a good funeral speech. Nobody suspects him. Why would they? He's up on the pulpit every Sunday looking appropriately tortured about the sins of the community, which, it turns out, is not an act so much as a very specific form of dramatic irony he's living through in real time.

This is where Hawthorne quietly rigs the whole experiment. Hester's punishment is public and finite — everyone can see it, judge it, and eventually get bored of it. Dimmesdale's punishment is private and has no end date. He gets to keep his reputation and his guilt, both, indefinitely, which sounds like getting away with it until you notice it's slowly killing him.

I'll admit I used to read this and think Hester obviously had the raw deal. Public shame, single motherhood, a permanent fashion accessory she never asked for. But the longer the book goes on, the more it looks like Dimmesdale got the worse sentence, and nobody even had to hand it to him. He built it himself, one Sunday sermon at a time.

Years pass, and this is where the book does something I did not expect the first time I read it: Hester does not fall apart. She works. She sews. She helps sick people and poor people and difficult people, and she does it well enough, for long enough, that the town starts to reconsider what the letter A is even advertising. Less "adulterer." More "the person you call when things go wrong." Her whole identity outgrows the thing that was supposed to define her forever.

Dimmesdale gets the opposite trajectory. The town keeps promoting him, spiritually speaking — more admired, more trusted, more essential — and every ounce of praise seems to cost him something, because he knows exactly how little of it he's earned. It's a fairly brutal joke Hawthorne is telling: the reward for hiding your worst secret well is that people keep rewarding you for it.

Then Roger Chillingworth turns up — Hester's husband, long presumed lost at sea, very much alive and standing in the crowd during her public shaming, which is a genuinely rough way to find out your marriage has a subplot. He figures out who the father is fairly quickly. And instead of doing the obvious thing and exposing him, he does something quieter and, frankly, worse.

He moves in with the guy. Becomes his physician. His companion. Studies him the way you'd study a slow leak in a boat, patiently, professionally, waiting to see exactly where it gives out. He never confronts Dimmesdale. He doesn't have to. He just keeps proximity, and lets guilt do the demolition work on its own schedule.

It's one of the coldest characters in literature, and it doesn't involve a single raised voice.

Eventually Dimmesdale can't hold the weight anymore, and he climbs back up onto that same scaffold, in front of the same town, and says the thing out loud. It doesn't fix his health. It doesn't undo seven years. The town doesn't throw him a parade. But for the length of one confession, he stops performing the lie, and that turns out to be its own kind of relief, even priced the way it's priced.

People tend to describe this book as being about sin, and I think that's the least interesting way to read it. It's really about labels and guilt and how people survive judgment. Because sometimes the scarlet letter that hurts the most is invisible.

This is the story of The Scarlet Letter.